Send your first email

Sending email to your audience is really easy with EcoSend. To begin, just create a Broadcast.

Broadcasts are how you send most emails in EcoSend — newsletters, "mailshots”, announcements, and seasonal campaigns. Use Broadcasts when you're sending an email to a bunch of people at once.

For more detail on each step, see the Broadcasts section of our support docs.

What you need in order to send your first email

Before you can send your first email you just need a few key basics:

1. An audience (and their permission to send emails to them)
2. An email
3. Something to say(!)

Assuming you have already set up your sending domain and Sender Profile, added your privacy policy, and are verified to send, then you can send your first email right away.

Step 1: Get your audience into EcoSend

If you’re just starting out, you may only have a small number of contacts — you can add these manually, or import them from a spreadsheet or CSV.

If you’ve already been actively running email marketing and are migrating from another system, you’ll want to use our import tools, like our Mailchimp import, or our CSV importer.

And to make sure you continue to build an audience going forward, you’ll want to use Forms — you can embed these on your website, and share them on social media easily.

Learn more about the many use cases and options for Forms.

The most important factor to bear in mind, of course, when emailing anyone is to make sure you have their permission. Do not send email to contacts that have not opted in to receive emails from you. This is illegal in most regions, and is against the terms of using EcoSend — your contacts won’t take kindly to it and neither will we.

Step 2: Craft your email

You’ve come to the right place to send beautiful, readable, accessible, impactful emails.

The email builder in EcoSend gives you a calm, focused writing experience, with perfect default settings for readability, typography, and spacing.

You can add beautiful images easily by dragging them in. All images are automatically optimised and compressed so they’re as light as possible without compromising on quality. You can add a personal touch to your campaigns with Variables, and you can even code your own emails with HTML if you want to get really serious.

EcoSend is packed with features to make sending emails easy, trustworthy, reliable, and dare-we-say-it, a little fun. Ultimately, we want you to be successful sending email with us — that’s why we’re here.

When crafting an email, you can save a draft at any time, save anything you want to reuse as a saved block, save your design as a template, preview the email on desktop and mobile, and send a test email to make sure it looks just right.

Review Mode constantly analyses your email to help you avoid making mistakes — like typos, grammar issues, missing links, compliance problems, missing alt-text, and even calls out accessibility issues.

If you’re keen to get more tips on how to craft a good email, you might want to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter which gives you helpful tips, advice, and inspiration every Friday.

Step 3: Hit send

Once you have your audience in, you’ve created your email, and you’ve checked it a few times then you’re ready to send.

Before hitting the big green “Send” button we recommend doing a few things:

1. Be sure to re-read the email at least once.
2. Always, always send a test email to yourself, and ideally at least one other person. There is almost always something that someone else will pick up that you haven’t!
3. Take a deep breath — sending an email to many people at once is often an anxiety inducing experience. Don’t over-think it — just go for it.

Schedule your email for later

If you don’t want to send your email immediately, you can schedule it.

If you choose to schedule your Broadcast for a future time or date, EcoSend will automatically update your audience so any last-minute additions or unsubscribes will be factored in.

Learn more about sending and scheduling Broadcasts.

Enjoy!

Once you’ve sent your first email with EcoSend, it might just be time to make a cup of tea.

Be sure to check back in within the next 12-24 hours to see how your campaign has performed, via both your Broadcast metrics and Insights dashboard.

If you want to talk through anything with us, or have any questions, be sure to reach out at any time. We’d love to hear how it went!

Video walkthrough

If you prefer to follow along with a video for instructions like this, here’s a video of Chris showing you how to send a Broadcast in EcoSend.